Journal to dialog with healing

In the process of healing from disease, we attend most keenly to the physical body, urging it with therapies, drugs, and other interventions to return to wholeness. But it’s important to attend as well to our mental, emotional, and spiritual selves with just as much focus and care.

It’s in the synthesis of our inner and outer selves that healing can most effectively take place. To force a physical cure without thought for the health of our inner being is to invite the return of disease, sooner or later.

How can we give our inner selves the care and feeding it needs? A very simple and eminently accessible way is to journal. Journaling is where we examine our life with the greatest intimacy. It is our chance to reflect and find resolution. It results in reconciliation of the inner and outer aspects of self.

Indeed your journal is your most sympathetic and intuitive ‘doctor.’

For far too long, we in the Western world have placed our entire wellbeing in the hands of medicine. While this has allowed for tremendous advances in the science of healing, it has eclipsed the art and soul of healing. Without the later, we’ve lost touch with our inner selves. Our bodies possess great wisdom in their own right, and we ignore these in-sights at our own peril.

By establishing a dialog with your inner being, you establish a true and powerful control over your process of healing. You create a relationship between your deepest desires and your physical body. You begin to understand the totality of your being, inside and out. You are able to gain a new perspective, one that reconciles all aspects of your awareness. Through journaling, you begin to comprehend who you are and how you got here.

Serious illness of any kind is terrifying. The mental repercussions of contracting a serious disease or suffering a debilitating accident can render the individual utterly helpless and depressed. And then, deprived of inner fortitude, the patient succumbs to the malady without defense.

But we do not have to sacrifice ourselves so completely. We can create a relationship with healing through journaling. Here are a few suggestions for such a process.

Set a regular schedule for journaling and stick to it. Remember that the times when you don’t feel like journaling are likely to be the times when you most need to do it, and you end up with the most powerful entries.

Journal in your own handwriting if at all possible. There’s something cathartic about handwriting that you can’t get through the keyboard. Do not worry if the writing’s messy or misspelled. Use the pen to emphasize your emotions and reactions, huge or teeny, dark or light, flowing or choppy, or whatever. And don’t ignore your urges to make little sketches or paste in objects or graphics at whim.

Talk to your disease, to your body, to your healing process. Go ahead and write out the dialog. What does your disease say? How do your heart and soul respond? Taking on the persona of your illness is scary but revealing, and ultimately curative.

Be sure to go back and re-read your entries now and then. While journaling is in itself rewarding, the crowning glory of the process is in seeing where you were back then, and how you are different now.

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Mari L. McCarthy is an author and journaling therapy expert. Don’t forget to check out details below of how you can win a copy of Mari’s book Dark Chocolate for the Journaler’s Soul – a collection of personal journaling stories to comfort and delight anyone who is interested in personal growth and healing.

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11 thoughts on “Journal to dialog with healing”

Mari – another great journaling article. I especially liked your reminder to take the time to go back and re-read your journals. I am always amazed when I step back into those times when I was down and out and see how my life has improved over time. I would otherwise forget so many of the experiences that have contributed to my life!

Mari (and Marie), thanks for this post. I needed it today! Though I blog, I have never tried to “talk” to my disease. But I’m going to give it a whirl. Thanks for the gentle push to delve deeper.
-Renn

Mari,
I appreciate your take on journaling as the heart and soul of healing. I also love the idea of talking to your body through your journal so you can really listen to the voice within that can tell you things you may not realize already. Journaling for Healing is an awesome endeavor, one worth investing into daily.

I have chosen your post, Journal to Dialog with Healing, as the #JournalChat Pick of the Day on 12/6/11 for all things journaling on Twitter.
I will post a link on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, my blog and website Refresh with Dawn Herring, and in Refresh Journal, my weekly e-journal: http://www.refreshwithdawnherring.blogspot.com/.

You and Marie are both welcome to join us for #JournalChat Live on Thursdays at 4 CST/2 PST for all thing journaling on Twitter; our topic this week is journaling to define your day.

Thanks again for such a wonderful, compassionate view of journaling for healing.

Be refreshed,
Dawn Herring
JournalWriter Freelance
Host of #JournalChat Live and Links Edition on Twitter

Journaling is such a wonderful outlet. I subscribe to it heavily. I’m convinced that journaling is one of the best ways to heal from any setback that has touched our lives. Words have a way of soothing and releasing emotions that otherwise stay locked up. Thanks for this wonderful post.
XOXO,
Jan

Getting words down on paper can help clear your head of thoughts and ideas that are chasing around your head. I have found journaling to be very effective way of seeing my way clear out of the mental haze I encountered during treatment.

For anyone interested in learning more about this topic I would also recommend a book by Dr. James W. Pennebaker, called Writing to Heal: A Guided Journal for Recovering from Trauma and Emotional Upheaval. Dr Pennebaker helped pioneer a study of individuals using expressive writing as a method of healing. He found that short-term focused writing can benefit all types of people, from those dealing with a terminal illness to victims of violent crime to first-year college students.

In Writing to Heal, Pennebaker says, “People who engage in expressive writing report feeling happier and less negative than before writing. Similarly, reports of depressive symptoms, rumination, and general anxiety tend to drop in the weeks and months after writing about emotional upheavals.”

Mari, thanks for the tips on journaling. All great! Especially going back and looking at old entries and where you were. Can be rewarding, and or can help you to see patterns to try and keep on feeling and getting better.

Only the part about writing rather than typing … for me, personally, it’s so much less frustrating to type. I know, you aren’t supposed to go back and change things, but I just find I can get closer to what’s going on in my head if I have that option and if I don’t have to put all my energy into writing with my semi arthritic hands.

This is a very wide, insightful posting, and I like how you describe journaling as having a dialogue with oneself. I journal regularly, and it has helped me heal somewhat from my breast cancer experience. I document my pain in this journal, and it feels like a trusted friend. I also agree with writing journal entries by hand. It really brings the writing closer to oneself, I believe.

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